There is that...

So, the computer age was supposed to usher in this era of seamless transactions around the world at a touch of a button, right?  Well, not so much.  Here are your options if you want to transfer money from a Canadian bank to an American bank: (1) Drive to the U.S., open an account, drive back to Canada, spend $30 to wire yourself your own money, then drive back; (2) Pay your Canadian bank $25 a month to click on a button to connect the two accounts so you can do internet money transfers (this isn't even an option with the American banks, who are apparently legally prevented from doing this transfer to an "alien" country); (3) write a personal cheque to yourself and wait two weeks for it to clear as the two banks MAIL each other the necessary paperwork.   Nice.  I can't wait to see how it goes when I try to cash my fellowship cheque from the Canadian government!  But, in the "totally pointless international bureaucracy resolved" file, my car is now legal in the United States, pending a safety inspection next week (and yet another $29 fee).  For two countries with so many similarities, it's really quite amazing how many seemingly unnecessary and pointless barriers are erected between them.  However, I was (for the first time) misinterpreted when I pronounced the word "out" this week in "Canadian" - I never believed we pronounced "out" any differently than the Americans, but apparently the stereotype is true. 

The research planning is going pretty well though.  I had another couple of meetings this week and now have a pretty firm idea regarding what I want to work on.  One project which isn't my idea but I found really interesting is trying to make an improved surgical adhesive by trying to simulate the thousands of hairs on the feet of geckos which allow them to climb walls - it sounds like a great way to incorporate what I know about gels with some exciting new work in fabricating structures on the nanometre-level in conjunction with a company which specializes in such work.  I'm also going to pursue my own idea for making biodegradable polymers for delivering insulin in a "smart" way by testing and then responding to the blood glucose concentration (the higher your blood glucose, the more insulin the material will release into the blood).  At least I hope that's what the material will do - it makes sense on paper, but when you stick something in the body, you never quite know what may happen.  On the bright side, I have thought of about four other things that the material may also be useful for, so as long as I can make the stuff, I'm pretty confident I can find something to use it for.  I also have one last meeting coming up this week with a group which is trying to make a drug delivery implant which can be turned on and off by heating the patch locally with a magnetic field.  I think my Ph.D. work can essentially be used to solve the problem it sounds like they are having in making their device, so if I can pull that off it would be a quick and exciting contribution.  So, I should finish my proposals and planning this week (or early next week) and start up in the lab soon. 

I also had a great time playing softball with the lab on Thursday night.  Amazingly, despite not having played softball in five years, I was one of the better players on our team.  This is less of a compliment to my own skills and more a commentary on how seriously softball is taken in the lab (i.e. not very much), which is exactly the way I like to play sports.  I think we ended up losing 17-11 in a highly intense pitcher's duel, a game we may well have won if anybody in the outfield in the final inning actually knew how to catch or throw a softball.  I think I also talked a co-worker into playing tennis with me, so that could be fun.

Finally, from the "how big a geek am I" file: perhaps my most exciting accomplishment this week was connecting my computer up to my new TV.  Why is this exciting and/or remotely useful?  Well, I subscribed to MLB.TV so I could watch the Blue Jays games via web streaming (it's amazingly good actually, a pretty smooth picture).  Now, instead of sitting on my desk chair and pretending to work while watching the game on my computer screen, I can recline on my couch and pretend to work on my laptop (while all the time simply checking the live boxscore and/or how my fantasy baseball team is doing).  So, not only does this increase my enjoyment level, but also sends my productivity skyrocketing in that I can both watch baseball AND read about baseball ALL AT THE SAME TIME!  I know, it's the gift of being an engineer, being able to identify such efficiencies.  However, with the current state of my fantasy baseball team, perhaps the less I read about it, the happier I will be...

For your enjoyment, the view of Cambridge and Boston out of my 16th floor living room window:

Left picture - looking at the Charles River (bottom right), flowing right to left toward downtown Boston.  Also one of the many rowers on the river virtually all day.  The Boston University Athletics facilities are right across the river.  Right picture - looking out over east Cambridge (the Charles River curves around, running just in front of the weird multi-tiered building on the top left).  Fenway is just out of the shot to the left (if you lean over the balcony, you can see the Citgo sign above the Green Monster).  Harvard is about a 10 minute walk up the river, MIT is about 30 minutes down the river toward downtown.

It's been an interesting week as I started up my posting at MIT.  The day I showed up (last Thursday), I was immediately signed up for a weekend-long conference honoring my new research supervisor.  It was exhausting (9AM until 11:30PM on Saturday of solid conferencing, including about five hours of my very favourite activity - "networking"), but did give me a great opportunity to meet a lot of the people in the lab.  This is no small feat - there are 110 people associated with the lab in some way, with about 70 of those people actively doing research (undergrad/grad students or post-docs such as myself).  The conference speakers were kind of the who's-who of the field, a pretty crazy lineup you would virtually never find at any other conference, and congratulatory letters were received from everybody from the Red Sox (my boss is throwing out the first pitch at a Sox game in a few weeks) to Dubya himself.  To put this guy into perspective, he has 890 publications in the literature and 550 issued or pending patents.  The publication total is impressive in academia, although not unprecedented; the patent frequency, on the other hand, is unprecedented.  Somebody in their "tribute" presentation mentioned that he ranks number three in U.S. history in terms of number of patents issued, behind Thomas Edison and somebody else whose name I didn't actually recognize.  So, it was an interesting but somewhat intimidating/exhausting start to MIT.

This past week was perhaps even more interesting.  I had a bit of a surreal conversation with one of the sub-project leaders (i.e. one of the five guys who actually runs the research in the lab while the Big Boss does his own thing) who warned me to be careful who I talked to about research ideas lest they be "stolen" from me prior to my being able to try them out.  I was also basically told to avoid one of the project leaders entirely because "he things he owns you".  The moral of the story (combined with all the glad-handing witnessed at the conference last weekend): a successful lab brings in people who are driven by doing genuinely interesting good science (me and many others I've met) and people who are driven to fame and fortune no matter who they have to step on along the way.  So, amidst the opportunity comes what is obviously a bit of a political minefield where you have to be careful who you talk to and what you say.  Indeed, the culture of the lab has made it very hard for me just to find out what is going on so I can decide where I want to spend my time - nobody really wants to tell me too much in terms of exactly what is happening under their domain.  On the other hand, I basically have an unlimited budget to do whatever I want, which is not a bad thing.  I think I have a pretty reasonable research idea now, extending on my controlled insulin release work from my PhD, but I definitely want to do some more reading first before jumping in.  I also have a couple more meetings with project leaders this coming week to try to figure out what other opportunities might be out there before I commit to anything.  

Anyway, the church hunting is continuing today - off to Park Street Church for an evening service (good news: get to sleep in; bad news: seems a little odd not to go to church on a Sunday morning). 

While the Isreal-Lebanon conflict is obviously generating the lion's share of the news headlines here (along with the collapse of one of the ceiling panels on one of the "Big Dig" tunnels, a $15 billion project to bury all the expressways in downtown Boston, which killed one woman), Bush's decision to veto legislation giving federal money to embryonic stem cell research has also generated a lot of buzz.  This is particularly true in my scientific circle, since the lab I just joined is one of the relatively few labs in the U.S. which conducts this kind of research (although I will not be a part of it, by choice).  Only Massachusetts, Michigan, and California provide state funding for embryonic stem cell research - anywhere else, it's not illegal but nobody will give you money to do it, which practically shuts the research down.

This is one issue I have very mixed feelings about.  There are very valid scientific reasons why embryonic stem cells offer vast potential to fix a lot of problems.  One of the big pushes in bioengineering now is the growth of replacement organs - that is, instead of doing temporary patches while waiting for a human donor organ, the goal is to actively grow the different tissues comprising the heart by giving a stem cell (the ultimate "parent cell" type of all the cells in our body) the correct stimuli to "decide" which tissues to make and how to put them together.  This is essentially what happens during the development of a baby and is not nearly as science fiction as it sounds.  Indeed, right now (and using fairly unsophisticated techniques), we can grow simple organs (like the ear) fairly successfully in mice.  While embryos aren't the only source of stem cells, they are by far the least differentiated and thus the easiest to manipulate.  That means that while a mesenchymal stem cell (the next best kind of stem cell, from bone marrow) might be signalled to produce some of the different tissues in the bone or many blood cells, it wouldn't be able to produce lung tissue.  Embryonic stem cells are further back in deciding what they want to be "when they grow up", so they are easier to influence (kind of like McDonalds advertising Happy Meals to 3-year-olds).  So, as a scientist, I understand why people want to do this work - it makes sense and it may well work in quite amazing new ways.  The argument that the embryos the scientists want are simply slated for destruction anyway (if the parents don't want/need the embryos) is also somewhat compelling.  Why destroy something that may be used to impart very significant improvements in human health?  

However, here's where I think this whole debate is totally missing the boat.  Somehow, without any significant public debate, we have allowed 400,000 embryos (which have already been developed for up to six days prior to being frozen so that the in vitro fertilization doctors can select the "best" of the fertilized eggs to implant to maximize the chance for a successful pregnancy) to be put into storage.  If these embryos are deemed to be "unneeded" for pregnancy (a likely result if the couple chooses not to have additional children), all of these embryos are effectively marked for disposal , at least in the long term.  So, in a sense, the stem cell debate isn't about whether or not to kill embryos; it's more about how and when to kill them.  Or, put in another way, this embryo debate has effectively already been settled while nobody was paying attention.  While I would still personally refuse to do embryonic stem cell research since I believe that embryos are "humans" (that is, they contain everything required to form a human being), stem cell research may in fact be the best of two bad solutions to the embryo stockpile.

Well, made it in one piece to Boston (or Cambridge, more specifically).  The trip down was pretty smooth - James kindly drove the U-Haul most of the way (except for the border, which was shockingly easy to pass through, and Buffalo), the apartment is nice (I'm still getting lost with all the space compared to my baseline accommodations at the Beverly Hills).  Everything is (finally!) set up and things look pretty nice (if I do say so myself).  Being a "resident alien" is quite complicated here.  I've already done my social security application, transferred my license, and applied for health coverage (yours for a mere $2300US per annum).  Registering my car is turning out to be a nightmare though.  Let me outline the process: manufacturer's letter confirming conformity with U.S. safety and environmental regulations, clear customs at the port, buy insurance (and no major insurance company sells auto coverage here, haven't quite figured out why yet although I think it has something to do with the lack of a limit in how much liability you can sue somebody for if you are in a collision), get a form from the insurance agent, acquire and process a tax waiver, apply for plates, get safety and emissions test inspection, and then... collapse with exhaustion, far too tired to drive such that having a car is really quite redundant.  At any rate, I've done all I can for the time being and tomorrow I head into MIT to... well, start another whole round of paperwork.  Good times!

The "Canada and the U.S. are two different countries????" award: to U-Haul.  When you rent a truck, you get 1004 free kilometres included in the rental price.  However, since the rental was being dropped off in the U.S., the computer printed this figure out in miles (624) - however, it being a Canadian computer, the unit on the distance limit was left in kilometres. So, naturally, when I drop off the truck, the Cambridge U-Haul people claim that I traveled 330-something more kilometres than I was allowed (the truck odometer was in kilometres, even though the truck was licensed in Arizona due to their having the laxest safety laws in North America).  They can only go by the contract (annoying, but I get it) so I end up paying $0.40 (American, not Canadian which was the quoted rate) on the phantom extra distance.  So I call the Hamilton office where I rented the truck and they are willing to refund me the amount I paid - only in Canadian funds, where as I paid the amount in American funds.  Nice work U-Haul.  I get the feeling that Mars probe which failed a couple years ago because somebody forgot to do a unit conversion was actually the work of undercover U-Haul spies at NASA.  Anyway, it's now in "customer mediation", so we'll see what happens.

Anyway, enough venting.  Governmental hoop-jumping aside, Cambridge/Boston is a pretty nice place - I have a great view of the Charles River right out my balcony, with a view of the almost-constant barrage of rowing teams heading down towards the port.  MIT and Harvard apparently have a fierce rowing rivalry, so that might be fun to watch.  So far, I've explored pretty much the whole city of Cambridge and most of the suburbs to the North as well as some of the older neighbourhoods of Boston (Back Bay, Beacon Hill, and (of course) Fenway!).  It's really easy to walk to a lot of places, the subway system is quite good, and driving is actually not too bad from my place, which is kind of at the gateway to a lot of major arteries (as long as you don't mind selling internal organs in order to afford the parking fees).  However, the city design is about the furthest from a grid as one could imagine, with one-way streets, traffic circles, and converging squares the norm instead of the exception, which makes navigating around the city itself somewhat interesting.  At Harvard Square (the worst offender I have found so far) there are three consecutive roundabouts in about 300m of roadway which appear to be totally random - no lane markers, no street names (only general signs giving you city destinations, generally located right at the split such that it is much much too late to do anything about it if you're wrong anyway).  Fun fun fun.  Can't wait to try that when it snows...
Still haven't gotten to the North End (of Paul Revere/American Revolution fame) or the Quincy Market, probably to-do this weekend.  I've also started the church shopping and am at least intrigued enough with the first option (a 200-year old church downtown right on the Boston Common) to try it out again.  There's another church about a two-minute walk from me which also looks interesting enough to take a look.

And on the more mundane observations.  One of the strangest phenomena I've noticed here is that everybody is in love with organic foods.  I had to drive a total of ten minutes before I found a store which would sell me a bag of Oreos, whereas a five minute walk takes me past two stores which would sell me low-fat, all-natural, grain-fed, free-range goat cheese and/or rare coffee beans grown by fair trade farmers owning wind farms.  I just tonight tried "Organic French Fries" - apparently a "great source of vitamin C!"  The even stranger part of the whole experience is that the parking lot to both these stores is half full of SUV's (motto for these people: "we want only natural things but are working as hard as possible to change this")  Also: it is almost impossible to find frozen juices, for some unknown reason.  Cambridge prides itself on being "funky", which in the commercial sense can effectively be translated "devoid of most products you would actually want and/or afford". 

Stuff that is really cheap: milk ($2.29 a gallon, roughly the same size as the 4L bags)
Stuff that is inexplicably expensive: muffins, ground beef (cheapest lean ground beef I've found so far - $4.99/lb - and that's not even for free-roaming, BGH-free, grain fed!  To think!)
Strangely Canadian item: apparently, there is a distinctly Canadian variety of bread - you can buy it here in white or whole wheat varieties.  I have no clue what makes it Canadian (flour coated with maple syrup?) but I must try for patriotic reasons if nothing else.

Finally, the winner of the most amusing bumper sticker award (a take off of the classic "If you can read this, you're too close"): "If you can read this, you're not the President" (let's just say that if Cambridge was representative of the entire United States, the Republican party might as well just pack up and move somewhere far, far away)

Enough rambling for one day...